Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley
Christ the King, November 25, 2018
Year B: 2 Samuel 23:1-7; Psalm 132:1-13; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.

Let not Sinne devoure thy fold,
Bragging that thy blood is cold,
That thy flesh hath lost his food,
And thy Crosse is common wood.

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.
George Herbert, “L’Envoy”
[The form of the poem as I give it here, isn’t the original, but Edward Bairstow’s adaptation of it in his “Five Songs of the Spirit” for baritone, which I sang to introduce the sermon—with the great help of Randy Benway as pianist.]

Today is the Feast of Christ the King—and that word “king” is one that many—maybe most—of us here at Good Shepherd are not too happy with. There are good reasons for that. What does “king” even mean to people in the US two hundred and some odd years after we got rid of the whole lot? And isn’t it hopelessly tainted with assumptions of patriarchy—not to mention hints of violence and arbitrariness?
But I want to say today that we need to rethink our suspicion. I”m not going to propose that the US should replace our elected president with a crowned monarch. But I can’t help noticing that many, many people in the world today seem to have a great hunger to have some one significant person to lead them, guide them, tell them what their lives mean and what to do about it—someone to protect them, to make them feel better about themselves.
It seems to be a fairly basic human longing. And it can take a bad turn. Some of it is as trivial as the worldwide fascination with celebrities. Some takes the form of giving too much credit to the self-proclaimed experts that tell us what to eat and how to decorate our homes and how to raise our children and . . . you name it. But some of it has become very political and has sweeping consequences.

We’re living right now in a new and unexpected era of “strong man” governments. For a long time, we thought this sort of thing was restricted to third-world countries. But Mr. Putin in Russia and Mr. Orbán in Hungary have been making quite a career of it in Europe. And they have lots of wannabes trying to follow in their footsteps—including our current president. But don’t, please, think that this disease is limited to political conservatives. Leftists like Mr. Maduro in Venezuela and Mr. Ortega in Nicaragua play it, too. And the Ortegas seem to have become increasingly hard to distinguish from their right-wing predecessors, the Somoza family. And the rest of us now find ourselves wringing our hands and being perplexed and appalled that people would actually vote such regimes into office.
Of course, these “strong men” aren’t literally kings. (The word “dictator” comes closer.) Traditional kings, even in their heyday, were typically surrounded by political and social checks and balances—and by sacred ideals, as in David’s poem about the true king in our first lesson this morning:

One who rules over people justly,
ruling in the fear of God,
is like the light of morning,
like the sun rising on a cloudless morning,
gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.

Our current crop of strong men are nothing like this. They’re committed only to the narrow interests of their own factions. Their goal is not to unite people but to eradicate all opposition. They seek to dominate and reshape their communities with the tools of fear, suspicion, and hatred.

Against these developments, we can and do set the ideals of democracy, of justice, of human rights—ideals that match well with our Christian faith. But that may not be enough by itself. Abstract ideals aren’t always enough to sustain human beings, even the most rational of us. We need not just ideals but embodiment. We need to see ourselves and our hopes and our highest values embodied in a person.
The approaching seasons of Advent and Christmas should, in fact, remind us of that. Why? Because they proclaim how God’s boundless mercy and generosity have now come to us embodied in the person of the Christ—this person we celebrate today as our “King.” And Jesus is a king who presents the sharpest possible contrast to the strong men of our time. For our king rejects the strategies of fear, suspicion and hatred and founds this kingdom of which we are part on trust and hope and love.
Jesus makes all this clear in his audience with Pilate: “If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over. . . . But . . . my kingdom is not from here.” And this is the kingdom of which we are a part. This is the person we acclaim freely as our king. Say “monarch,” of course, if you prefer. I, too, like its ungendered character; I only fear that it summons up the image of a political office more than that of a concrete person who can help me know who I am and how I want to live in this world.

I know there is also a danger here—the danger of remaking Jesus in the image of the strong men around us. In fact, we Christians have done that again and again—invoking Jesus as our leader against heretics, against people of other religions, even against each other. Protestants and Catholics of the seventeenth century were mirror images of one another in their confidence that Jesus was on their side. And, as Abraham Lincoln ruefully observed, both North and South in the Civil War prayed to the same God and expected God’s favor for their cause.
So, yes, there’s danger in calling Jesus “king.” There is nothing so pure in our world that we humans can’t misuse it; we’re very good at that. And that’s why I began with that poem by George Herbert. “King of Glory, King of Peace.” We’re apt to think of “glory” as something military. But Herbert undercuts that idea and restores the truth of Jesus’ kingship. Jesus’ glory is shown in bringing peace, even at the cost of his own life
Herbert prays for Jesus’ kingship to become truly manifest among us and in us—prays that we will trust Jesus’ glory and power in a way that can make us, too, agents of peace. Otherwise, what good did it do to shed his blood, to let his body be hung up on the wood of the cross, to feed us again and again in this Holy Communion with his own life?
Sin would like to convince us that it was all for naught. Sin would like to convince us to take the way of the strong man, the one who deals in fear and suspicion and hatred. Sin would like us to believe that Jesus’ blood was wasted, that his life can no longer nourish us, that the cross was just ordinary wood.
But we are people of Jesus. We do not accept that. We belong to a kingdom of glory and peace, of love and mercy. We have a heritage that has again and again given life to true human community after times of destruction. And we will not dishonor our king. In fact, we will proclaim his kingship in our lives. Even if the word “king” may seem hopelessly tainted for many of us, let our lives continue to show the trust and hope and love—the allegiance—to which it points.

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.

Let not Sinne devoure thy fold,
Bragging that thy blood is cold,
That thy flesh hath lost his food,
And thy Crosse is common wood.

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.